From Claude.ai on 7/6/2026.
Tikkun Soferim: The Emendations of the Scribes
What the term means
Tikkun soferim (תיקון סופרים, plural tiqqunei soferim) is a rabbinic term for a change made to the wording of the Tanakh in order to protect God’s honor or avoid theologically uncomfortable language. Rabbi Simon ben Pazzi, a third-century sage, is credited with first calling these readings “emendations of the Scribes” in Midrash Genesis Rabbah, treating them as actual scribal alterations to the text. Masoretic tradition variously attributed the changes to Ezra alone, to Ezra and Nehemiah, to Ezra and the Soferim more broadly, or to a group including Ezra, Nehemiah, Zechariah, Haggai, and Baruch.
There has long been dispute over whether this label should be taken literally. Some sources use the term “tiqqun soferim” itself, while others prefer “kinnah hakatuv” — “the text is euphemistic” — a less contentious framing that doesn’t imply the biblical text was actually tampered with after the fact. The Wikipedia entry on the topic notes that some modern scholars go further, arguing the rabbis didn’t catalogue every instance and attempting to identify additional cases beyond the traditional list.
The traditional list and its sources
The number of tiqqunei soferim is most commonly given as eighteen, though some sources list fewer. These lists appear across a range of literature — from midrashic compilations like the Mekhilta and Sifre to Masoretic marginal notes. A complete list of eighteen can be found in Jacob ben Ḥayyim’s edition of the Mikraot Gedolot (Venice, 1524–25), decoratively encircling the first word of Numbers. The list also predates the medieval Masoretes considerably: it appears already in the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael and Sifre Numbers.
Cairo Genizah fragments give us a glimpse of how these lists actually circulated. One fragment preserves a partial version headed “18 words emended by the scribes in Scripture,” listing (before the page breaks off): Genesis 18:22, Numbers 11:15, Numbers 12:12, 1 Samuel 3:13, Habakkuk 1:12, Zechariah 2:12, Numbers 14:10, and 2 Samuel 16:12.
Examples
Genesis 18:22 — The traditional case here is usually described as a reversal of subject and object. As transmitted, the verse reads (ASV):
“And the men turned from thence, and went toward Sodom: but Abraham stood yet before Jehovah.”
Tradition holds the original wording had God “standing before Abraham” — awaiting the patriarch’s word — which was felt to be disrespectful to the divine dignity, so subject and object were swapped to have Abraham stand before the LORD instead.
Numbers 11:15 — Moses, overwhelmed by leading the people, says (ASV):
“And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favor in thy sight; and let me not see my wretchedness.”
The claim is that the original read “let me not see thy wretchedness” — i.e., God’s own distress — which was altered to “my wretchedness” so as not to attribute wretchedness to God.
1 Samuel 3:13 — Concerning the sons of Eli (ASV):
“For I have told him that I will judge his house for ever, for the iniquity which he knoweth; because his sons did bring a curse upon themselves, and he restrained them not.”
The tradition holds the underlying text originally named God as the object of the sons’ cursing, and the phrase was softened to have them merely “bring a curse upon themselves.”
Habakkuk 1:12 — The prophet addresses God (ASV):
“Art not thou from everlasting, O Jehovah my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O Jehovah, thou hast ordained him for judgment; and thou, O Rock, hast established him for correction.”
Here the received text reads “we shall not die,” but the emendation tradition holds the original said “thou shalt not die” — since suggesting God’s mortality, even hypothetically, was unthinkable, the pronoun was shifted from the divine subject to the human community.
Zechariah 2:8 (2:12 in the Hebrew) — In the ASV:
“For thus saith Jehovah of hosts: After glory hath he sent me unto the nations which plundered you; for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye.”
Tradition holds the original read “the apple of my eye” — God’s own eye — changed to the more distanced “his eye” to avoid an overly anthropomorphic image of God’s body.
Job 7:20 — Job protests to God (ASV):
“I have sinned; what do I unto thee, O thou watcher of men? Why hast thou set me as a mark for thee, so that I am a burden to myself?”
The emendation tradition holds this originally read “a burden to thee” — i.e., Job accusing God of being burdened by him — softened to Job being a burden to himself instead.
1 Kings 21:10, 13 — In the Naboth episode, the false witnesses accuse Naboth (ASV renders the intended sense):
“Naboth did curse God and the king.”
Here the Masoretic written text (ketiv) actually preserves the word “blessed,” even though everyone understood it to mean “cursed” — since it was considered improper for the text to juxtapose God’s name directly with the verb “curse,” even in a false accusation. Most English translations, including the ASV, render the verse according to the understood sense (“curse”) rather than the literal written euphemism (“bless”).
Scholarly assessment
The debate over how literally to take tikkun soferim has continued for centuries. Rashi, commenting on Job 32:3, explicitly repeats the claim that scribes altered the wording of Scripture at particular points, and offers further examples. This provoked real theological anxiety among later commentators — Shmuel Yaffe, author of the Yefeh To’ar commentary on Midrash Rabbah, pointedly asked that if the scribes altered the text in one place, what would stop the same being said of other places. Others, like Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn (1857–1935), argued it isn’t heretical to acknowledge scribal emendation in the Pentateuch’s transmission, since Rashi himself had already shown as much.
Modern academic treatment goes back over a century: W. Emery Barnes published “Ancient Corrections in the Text of the Old Testament (Tikkun Soferim)” in the Journal of Theological Studies in 1900, followed much later by Carmel McCarthy’s 1981 monograph “The Tiqqune Sopherim and Other Theological Corrections in the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament,” and Moshe Zipor’s study “The Masoretic Eighteen Tiqqune Soferim: The Birth and Transformations of a Tradition.” Zipor’s work in particular traces how the tradition of “eighteen” emendations developed and shifted over time, and notes — as you’d expect given the genre — that multiple, sometimes divergent lists of the tiqqunei soferim exist across the manuscript tradition.
For a manuscript-level view of how these lists were physically transmitted, the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit’s work on Taylor-Schechter fragments is worth a look — it documents new textual variants of specific tiqqunei soferim entries (including Numbers 14:10, Genesis 18:16, and Isaiah 26:19) recovered directly from Genizah material, which gives a much more granular picture than the standard printed lists.
